Bread Man Dead In Apartment 13

His name was Angelo. Angelo climbed the stairs backwards on his buttocks every day after work to get to his apartment on the third floor. He was in pain and there’s no elevator in this building. He worked for the bakery downstairs.

Angelo was born in this building. His mother had immigrated here  from Italy.
If you walked past Angelo’s door any time of the day or night, you’d hear him crying out because of his arthritis. That’s what they said he was suffering from. A neighbor told me that Angelo could have gone for medical treatments for his arthritis, if that’s what it was, but he didn’t trust anyone trying to help him.

I saw Angelo on an ambulance stretcher in the hallway one day, after the bakery had been closed for a couple of years. I wondered what Angelo had been doing inside his apartment alone all those years, since his mother had died a long time ago. The policewoman and emergency workers said nothing to me, so I said nothing, too. If I had known Angelo at all, I think I would have asked, “Where are you taking him?” I would have asked because, as far as I know, Angelo had no family in New York.

The police department stuck a bright green notice across the door of his apartment in the summer of 2009, when Angelo died. The green paper sealed that door tighter than any lock or steel latch.

A neighbor confirmed that Angelo was dead. Months later another neighbor said he doubted that there had been any memorial service for Angelo.

Today there was a bucket of soapy water and a long-handled mop outside of Angelo’s apartment. The handle of the mop was lodged diagonally in the doorway, barring all intruders. Some workmen had disposed of the contents of the apartment into huge, black garbage bags. About a dozen of these were stacked on the first floor for pickup by the sanitation department.
Two work orders were taped to the glass door near the entrance to the building. They said that the Greenwich Village Historic District had authorized construction work on the third floor of the building. The landlord was apparently ready to renovate apartment 13.

The apartments are pleasantly rectangular in that line. I mention this because in our building the apartments are usually oddly shaped. This row of buildings was built to house the influx of workingmen arriving from Italy in the early 1900s. The best guess of a neighborhood historian was that this building was built around 1911. The original architect’s floor plans were lost long ago.

When the crew is finished renovating apartment 13,  it will have new blond wood flooring. It will have a tiled bathroom. Each of these apartments originally came equipped with only a john and no place to bathe. A john is a small room with one toilet, but no sink for washing the hands and no tub for taking a bath. Maybe there were bathhouses in the neighborhood then. I don’t know.

The renovated apartment will have in addition a beautiful kitchen area with a sink, stove, refrigerator, counter space, and wooden cabinetry. The horribly cracked plaster walls will be removed, and the new sheet rock walls will be painted bright white.

They’ll probably make it into a one-bedroom apartment with a separate living room and even some built-in closets. These rooms originally had no closets, just three broad rough-hewn shelves above the kitchen sink. The renovated apartment will have air conditioning outlets in both the bedroom and the living room, and many other sockets in the kitchen for appliances. When Angelo’s mother first rented the apartment, this building was dark, not electrified.

When I moved here in 1971, the majority of the apartments were occupied by elderly Italian women wearing black dresses, stockings, and shoes. They were widows, born in the old country, afraid of the landlord and calling him “The Boss.” I was just a young woman then, 22 years of age, a recent college graduate. I passed them on my way upstairs, and never once did any woman in black turn to welcome me or talk with me. In their view, I should be married, not working. The Italian immigrants thought women who lived alone were up to no good.

This whole area, so trendy and upscale now, was in those days a poor section of Little Italy. The community was clannish in nature. They clung together and excluded all others.

They rejected Angelo as well, even though he was Italian. I heard from a neighbor that when he was a boy, everybody liked to pick on Angelo. He was yelled at by his irascible mother, a Mammy Yokum type (a cartoon character from the old L’il Abner series, which was published in the newspapers in those days). Angelo was bullied at school. The people at the bakery never gave him any peace when he grew up, either. He never married.

In the meantime, the whole world changed and this neighborhood was certainly no exception. The Village is now one of the most desirable sections of the city in which to live. Most of the young people in this building are paying very high rents.

The tenants usually do not speak with me in the hallways when I see them, even if I say hello to them in passing.  They walk down the stairs with wires plugged into their ears. My neighbors are transients, and they probably see me as a throwback to a bygone era, just as toothless Angelo always was to me …

Divisions between people come in so many different varieties …

I want to say that I don’t know the dead man any better than you know him. I shouldn’t even be writing this, because I am not in possession of all the salient facts. Since the Village is an historic district, however, I thought I would tell you a little history, all that I know about Angelo, who lived in this neighborhood his whole life.

I used to see Angelo every day pushing down the street a cart filled with bread for Zito’s Bakery. Zito’s Bakery has been closed for many years now.
I never once said hello to Angelo, and he never once turned his head to look at me, even though Angelo and I lived in the same building for 38 years.
As soon as Angelo’s apartment is renovated, it will most likely go on the market for over $3,000 per month rent. I do not exactly wish to put it this way, but as I’m sure you know from reading the above, the dead man himself was worth nothing.

Angelo is survived only by his apartment, located in the heart of quaint, old,  Greenwich Village.

You may be wondering why I started talking about Angelo and ended by talking about Angelo’s apartment. It is a peculiarity of human nature that apartments are often seen as more interesting and valuable than the people who live in them. 

 Copyright © 2013      Barbara A. English       All rights reserved.